After buying a Logan mat cutter at the end of last week, I finally got around to cutting some mats. Last year when I started painting with gouache, I painted on some randomly sized tiny pieces of paper that didn’t fit in any normal frame sizes. I think I painted so small because I wasn’t sure I’d even like the medium and didn’t expect any of them to be good. But as it turned out, some of them turned out really nice and worth displaying.

So, a year later, I finally got around to buying the equipment necessary to cut custom mats. Personally, I prefer a couple of inches of mat around an image. Especially if the image is semi small (ie 4×6 or 5×7 inch). So I matted up my small, oddly sized paintings to a standard 8×10 inch. This will also come in handy for the 6×9 inch gouache paintings I’ve been doing a lot of. I found some precut mats, but they are on the thin side and more expensive than they’re worth.

Just to put my new tool to more use, I’m going to contact some of the people I sold those small paintings to and ask if they would like a mat so they can frame them nicely. Also, here is a sneak peak at my latest oil painting project. It’s a special request from my husband.